


City Of Hope

by LananiA3O



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Arkham Knight AU, Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, Tim is not having a good night, Tim/Barb is canon in this verse btw, batfam team up ensues, what if Bruce really locked himself up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-06-23 13:37:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15607428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: Following the reveal of his Joker-poisoning and his deteriorating sanity to Tim, Bruce agrees to be locked away in Panessa Studios. The night quickly goes from bad to worse when Tim finds out about Barbara's "death". Thankfully, he's not alone in his struggles. With Bruce out of commission, the remaining Batfam comes together to show Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight that Batman is more than a man: he's the hope, strength, and tenacity he inspires in each life he touches.





	City Of Hope

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly don't remember where I got this idea from. One of my blog readers or live stream viewers (I think it was Isi7140) asked what would happen if Bruce really did let Tim lock him up. Well, here we are. 
> 
> For those of my readers who are staunchly anti-shipping: while this fic will have plenty of platonic bonding between the Batfam, Tim/Barb is a thing in this verse and is a big part of Tim's mind in this story, so there will be some shipping here. That's why it's categorized as multi. Proceed at your own risk.
> 
> For status updates, writing trivia, fandom/fanfiction/writing related questions and occasional random ramblings, please visit my tumblr: http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/

Bruce surrendered without a fight. That was the moment it hit him, the moment Tim realized just how serious the situation really was.

Just in this night alone, Bruce had been doused in Crane’s new and improved toxic fear cocktail, shot in the ribs, beaten up more times than Tim liked to imagine, and nearly blown up with a rocket, yet he had refused to rest, much less give up.

And now, Bruce all but shambled into the isolation cell.

It was surreal and yet it made sense. Tim understood now. It wasn’t the exhaustion that made Bruce all but drag his feet. It wasn’t pain that made him wince and gasp as he sat down on the cod. It wasn’t despair when he took off his gauntlets, belt, and cowl, and shoved them in Tim’s general direction. It wasn’t shame that made him look—no, glare—to his left, at the door, rather than at Tim.

Tim was no expert in fear-gas-induced nightmares nor was he a telepath, but he had a feeling he knew what Bruce was seeing in that doorframe. A hideous clown with a porcelain face, blood-red smile, and poison green hair, trying his best to convince Bruce that it was Robin who belonged in this cell, not Batman.

Tim shuddered at the thought. He wondered how many of Bruce’s recent decisions, how many of his behaviors since Arkham City, had been the product of a deranged clown whispering into Bruce’s ear from the grave. Now it suddenly made a horrifying kind of sense that he had let Lucius put actual, live, armor-piercing rounds on the Batmobile.

"I'm sorry, Bruce,” Tim muttered as he accepted the discarded gear. “But it's the only way."

"I know, Tim."

Robin winced. Bruce had never sounded so... _old_. The grief and haunting he had heard before, in those dark days when Tim had first joined the family, helping them look for a Robin, an ally, a brother and son they had ultimately failed to save. But the weariness of age in his voice... that was new.

"I'll stop Scarecrow,” Tim said with as much confidence as he could muster. He wasn’t entirely convinced himself. He was a badass detective and great with electronics, but Scarecrow and his damn Arkham Knight had an entire army of tanks that were using _only_ live rounds. He was fairly certain that what was waiting for him outside of Panessa Studios would make breaking into Arkham City look like child’s play. “Him and the Arkham Knight both.”

“The Arkham Knight...” Bruce ran a hand up his face and through his hair. “He is the one you really need to worry about, Tim. He knows everything about us. He knew about Oracle. He knew I would track his communications. He knew how to hack my comms. He knew where to shoot my armor for maximum damage. We went hand to hand on Founders’ Island briefly and it was like he could predict every single one of my moves.”

“Yeah, he’s got incredibly good intel and gear,” Tim admitted, “but between Barb, Dick, Alfred, Lucius and me, I’m sure we’ll manage.”

Bruce tensed. Then, a wide smile split his face and Tim felt his blood run cold. He stepped back quickly, past the threshold, and hit the door controls just in time for Bruce to jump to his feet and plant his fist against the glass.

Only it wasn’t Bruce anymore.

“Oh, birdie-boy, you’re a hoot!” Bruce... Joker... grinned at him, vivid green eyes glowing with malice and hunger. It was unnatural how high-pitched Bruce’s voice had suddenly become, although not nearly as unnerving as the fact that its cadence perfectly matched that of the clown. “I thought you were an improvement over the last boy blunder, but I guess you really are headed for a family reunion.” The... thing... that had been Bruce before flashed its bloodied teeth. “Don’t worry, little Robin... I’ll make sure to send the other half of the family after you.”

 _The other half?_ Tim felt a shudder creep up his back. Last he had checked, Jason was the only one who had died. Had something happened to Dick? Or, heaven forbid, to Barbara?

 _Or maybe the pathological liar is just lying to you_ , the logical part of his mind cut in. He didn’t have time for this. Not when Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight were planning to detonate a chemical weapon of catastrophic proportions in the middle of Gotham. Tim headed over to the storage units and locked up Batman’s cowl and gauntlets, then fished the hacking device, smoke pellets, disruptor, and voice synthesizer out of the belt and stored that, too. The voice recognition software for the studios was next. He calibrated it to allow only Robin, Nightwing, and Oracle to enter, locked all of Bruce's passwords to the Batcomputer, and activated the sight- and sound-proofing technology on Harley’s cell.

When he returned to Bruce one last time, the smile was gone. His eyes were blue again. It wasn’t enough.

“Get some rest, Bruce.” Tim entered the code for the airlock. “As soon as this is over, I’m gonna get Alfred or Leslie to come over and get that bullet out of your ribs. Then we’ll work on the cure. We’ll find a way. I promise.”

Bruce didn’t answer. He turned around slowly and lay down on the cod, wincing slightly as the movement aggravated the wound in his flank. He made no sound, but Tim could read his lips just fine.

_Jason. Jason. Jason. Jason..._

Tim activated the lock and took a deep breath as the glass glazed over with thick, white mist.

God help him. Bruce really had lost it.

***

“No, no, no, don’t tell me he’s gone!” The voice came through his comms sharp and biting. Agitated. Frustrated. Even a little desperate. “Batman doesn’t retreat! I’m sending in reinforcements. Find him!”

“Well, this is a great start.” Tim grimaced as he downloaded the latest militia update from the Batcomputer.

According to the satellites, there were currently six roadblocks, four watchtowers, three bombs, and sixteen drones in the city. It wasn’t too bad compared to what Bruce had been facing all evening, but then again, Tim wasn’t Bruce. He had never driven the new, Clash-of-Tanks version of the Batmobile. This was gonna be a painful learning curve.

He was just about to try and contact Barbara for the fourth time since getting out of the elevator when Alfred’s call came in.

“Hey Alfred!”

“Master Drake?” Seeing genuine surprise on Alfred’s face was a rare treat. He had seen it all, so surprises did not come naturally. Even when they did, Alfred was an expert at smoothing them over. In any other situation, Tim might have grinned, but tonight was decidedly not funny.

“Live and in color, Alfred. Bruce is...” _Insane? Joker? Becoming Joker?_ Tim bit his lip. How exactly was he going to say this without sounding crazy himself? “He is out of the picture for now. I left him at the movie studios.”

“Out of the picture?” Alfred raised one of his eyebrows. “Master Drake, please do not propagate Master Bruce’s terrible communication tendencies. What exactly is happening? Is Master Bruce in danger?”

“The fear gas he was exposed to earlier has taken a toll on his judgment,” Tim finally said with as straight a poker face as he could muster. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. It just wasn’t the only thing impairing Bruce’s judgment. “He’s in the movie studios, resting, and he’s safe for now. The sooner I deal with Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight, the sooner we can get him the help he needs.”

Alfred nodded slowly. “In that case, might I suggest that you take the car to the movie studios garage? I prepared another upgrade, increased capacity for the weapon launcher. It should help you get rid of the Arkham Knight’s tanks.”

“Good idea. Thank you, Alfred.”

He cut the line and grappled down the side of the building to the car. Tim felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as the cockpit opened and closed for him, engulfing him in a world of cold, dark angles. This Batmobile just felt... wrong. It was sharp and linear where the old one had been comfortable and curvy, cold and sterile, where the old one had been warm and... well, he wouldn’t have called it welcoming, but it had certainly felt less... hostile than this. The old Batmobile had had two seats in front and two in the back. This one only had the driver’s seat, with the passengers relegated to the trunk. He had ridden next to Bruce almost every night in the old one. The one time he had tried to get into the driver’s seat of the new one, Bruce had lectured at him for a solid half minute.

Back then, Tim had been scared and confused. Now he was scared and wary. He prayed to whatever higher powers were out there that Joker hadn’t put any truly self-sabotaging ideas into the design of the car.

The upgrade install took less than a minute, but Tim remained in the garage for a little while longer. There was one more conversation to be had and he wanted to have it without being surprised by red-and-gray-painted tanks. Thankfully, he had pulled the engineering plans for the car off the server a long time ago, or else the myriad of buttons might have been confusing. As it was, it took him all of two seconds to open the comms line to the Clock Tower.

“Hey Barb, you done with Bruce’s prio task yet?”

The line remained silent. There was the tiniest hint of crackling static, but it might as well have been his imagination.

“Oracle, please come in.”

The line remained silent. Dread started to resurface in his gut.

“Barbara, damn it, this isn’t funny! Get on the line now!”

The line remained silent. Tim could feel the cold spread from his neck down his back.

“Remote access Clock Tower VI. Authorization: Robin: I concur mylady.”

The memory of when Barbara had told him which code phrase she had programmed into the computer for him still made him want to laugh. Barbara had hated it sooo much when Harley had called her ‘Batlady’ at the amusement park and Tim had been happy to nag her with it. Only after her spinal injury had Barb finally had too little composure to act like it didn’t bother her anymore. He remembered quite clearly how she had suddenly screamed at him that day, telling him to stop calling her old and obsolete names like she was an old and obsolete thing. It had taken him hours to convince her that that was not what he had been trying to do.

“Remote access granted,” the Clock Tower VI’s voice replied. Cold, impersonal. A warped version of Barbara doing her best robot voice. “Please state your query.”

“Run life sign scan of Clock Tower facility.” Tim braced himself for the worst. If Barbara wasn’t answering the comms line, then the best case scenario was that she had gone to the bathroom for five minutes and he had just had the worst timing ever. The worst case scenario was—he didn’t want to think of the worst case scenario.

“Scan complete.” The VI paused and even though it was only a second and a half, it felt like eternity to him. “No life signs detected.”

Tim froze. There had to be a glitch. A malfunction. Something... “Run thermal scan. Run visual scan for irregular objects.” Such as a body lying on the floor where there was not supposed to be anything but carpet. _And please let it be negative_ , Tim prayed silently as his hands clutched the wheel like a vice. _Please let the stupid scan be negative and have it all just be a glitch, please!_

“Scan complete.” Another pause. “Thermal scan negative. Visual scan negative.”

“Run systems check: breaches, malware and malfunctions.”

“Systems check complete.” Tim flinched. That had been way too fast. “No anomalies detected.”

 _No anomalies detected._ The words echoed in his brain over and over, but that didn’t mean they made any more sense. It was ridiculous. It just couldn’t be. There was only one logical explanation for this combination of scan results: Barbara was no longer at the Clock Tower. Had Bruce taken her elsewhere? But if so, where? Definitely not Wayne Plaza. Founders’ Island had been inaccessible to the Batmobile until less than two hours ago and Barbara had been offline for much longer. _Maybe Wayne Tower?_

It made no sense, but he had to try. Tim typed in the comms configuration for Lucius’ office and was hit with solid static. “What the hell...”

For a moment, he thought that maybe the upgrade had screwed up something in the Batmobile. Then, the comms line to Alfred opened immediately and Tim shook his head. _What the hell was going on?_

“Alfred, I need your help.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t seem to contact neither Lucius nor Barbara. Can you try on your end, please?”

“I... have not been able to reach Mister Fox for some time now.” Alfred said quietly and there was something strained in his voice that made Tim’s blood want to curdle like milk after a thunderstorm. “I was going to ask you if you could drive by Wayne Tower and check on him, actually. This kind of behavior is highly unusual for Mister Fox.”

“I agree. It’s also highly unusual for Barbara,” Tim added. “According to the Clock Tower systems, the entire building is empty. Can you reach her?”

Suddenly Alfred looked twenty years older. Tim froze as he watched him close his eyes and take a deep breath. When he finally spoke again, his voice was heavy and weary. “Master Bruce did not tell you then?”

“Did not tell me what?!” He shouldn’t snap at Alfred. Tim knew, but his patience had just about reach his limits. “He hasn’t told me anything, Alfred! He hasn’t told anyone anything for the last nine months, as far as I’m aware, at least not where it really matters, so just stop beating around the bush and tell me where she is already.”

“Miss Gordon...” Alfred swallowed hard. “Miss Gordon was kidnapped from the Clock Tower earlier tonight, by the Arkham Knight. Master Bruce had made finding her his priority, but in the end he was too late. I am sorry, Master Drake. Miss Gordon is dead.”

“No!” The word left his mouth on sheer instinct, a quick gut reaction, before his body snapped his teeth and lips shut and pulled every single muscle in his body like a bow string. His heart was pounding in his ears as his brain tried to process the words he had just heard. It felt like he was standing in front of a TV screen, watching the news line run by on the bottom of the screen without processing its content. There were words there and his mind could read and identify the letters, but every time it tried to make sense of them, the information vanished in a cloud of denial.

“Master Drake? Master Drake!” Alfred was trying to talk to him. Some part of his mind was aware that Alfred was trying to talk to him. “Master Drake, please respond if you can hear me.”

“Where?” Another word that left his mouth on sheer automatic, except this time it cracked like a whip and finally dragged that running news crawl into focus. Barbara was dead. She was dead and Bruce had know for god knew how long and had not told him and— “Where did she die? How? When? How long has it been since the two of you have known? How LONG since you did NOT tell me?!”

“Master Drake—“

“WHERE IS SHE, ALFRED?!”

 _I shouldn’t yell_ , the thought popped up somewhere in the back of his mind, but it was drowned out by endless repetitions of ‘she’s dead’. Tim felt his fingers go numb as he clutched the steering wheel harder, as if he would fall through the bottom of the car and the hull of the Earth if he didn’t hold on for dear life.

“I need to see her, Alfred, please.” There. His mind had managed a full, rational, calm sentence at decent volume. Tim wanted to laugh. _A plus, gold star, you’re a winner._ “Where is she?”

“Scarecrow’s penthouse in Chinatown,” Alfred finally replied. “I am transmitting the coordinates now.”

That he did. Tim watched them appear on screen and wanted to laugh. They were so close. So damn close to Panessa Studios. It would take him two minutes to glide there and even less to drive.

Barbara had died less than two minutes from where he had been slaving away in search of a pointless cure, on orders of a man who was no longer himself.

Tim couldn’t recall ever having hated himself so much.

The garage door opened the moment the motor came online. A second later, he was flying down the streets at speeds that were bound to leave him splattered on a wall, if the car was made of anything but titanium-tipped alloys. He crossed the canal at the third bridge, turned right... and slammed straight into one of the tanks.

Someone’s voice came through his comms line, harsh and loud. Something about target acquired. Almost immediately after, the car shook with the impact of a round that could have reduced a normal car, and potentially even the old Batmobile, to scrap. His hands moved just as coldly as his mouth had done, taking aim and planting a round straight into the sensor of the tank. It exploded into a bright fireball. Tim waited until the heat sensors reported bearable outside temperatures again, then hit the eject mechanism and grappled up to the roof.

He could see the penthouse from here. Tim activated the detective mode of his cowl vision and felt his heart sink at the sight of a single, lifeless, sitting skeleton in the center of the pagoda. The wet tiles made soft thuds under his boots as he ran across the rooftops, gliding the short distances in between buildings.

The glass of the skylight just in front of the body had been broken on one side and Tim dropped down carefully. Even at first glance, he could see that there had been a fight here, although whoever Bruce had beaten to a pulp had already been collected and imprisoned by GCPD. Tim swallowed hard as he turned off his detective mode and stood up. He didn’t want to see this, but he had to. He just had to. He—

It wasn’t Barb.

Tim felt his heart stop. Even just a single, cursory glance, a swift look at the woman in the cell, told him that _that_ was not Barb. She was a redhead. She was in a wheel chair. She had pair of glasses. She had a hole in her skull that was leaking blood and brains all over the floor. And it was not Barbara.

“Oh god, thank you...”

Tim sank to his knees. He shouldn’t be happy. There was a dead woman in front of him, who had died because she looked close enough to be Barbara, at least to someone who’d been doused in fear gas before. Whoever this girl had been, she had not deserved to go out like this. But she was not Barb and as much as Tim hated himself for thinking this way, that was the happiest news in the world to him.

Tim allowed himself another minute of stasis, then stood up and took a deep breath.

Her hair was a slightly different shade of red. Her clothes were not what Barb had worn that day. Same cut, wrong colors. Her glasses where too round. She did not have a purple infinity tattoo on her wrist. Tim moved to the side of the container and opened the cell for all of half a second, before the hazard warning from his cowl made him slam it shut again.

Fear gas. Scarecrow had stuck a decoy in this room, had lured Bruce here, and had gassed her so she would kill herself with the gun that hung from her stiffening fingers. And if Bruce had been in his right mind, he would have seen through this in a second.

Then again, Bruce hadn’t been in his right mind since getting gassed by Scarecrow at Ace Chem. One could argue he hadn’t been in his right mind since getting poisoned by Joker in Arkham City.

“Alfred...” He started talking as soon as the channel was open. “I’ve got good news. It wasn’t Barb. Just a decoy. Bruce must have mistaken her for Barb because of the fear gas and—“ _Because he’s currently sharing his mind with a killer clown._ Tim shook his head. Better keep that one to himself a little longer. “He was mistaken. It wasn’t Barb. She’s still out there somewhere.”

“Oh thank God!” The relief was written all over Alfred’s face and Tim felt a hint of a smile tug on his lips. He hadn’t seen Alfred that emotive in... well, never actually. “That is quite possibly the first good news I’ve heard all day. In that case, maybe now would be a good time to—“

“Beta target sighted!”

Tim ducked on sheer instinct and heard the bullets fly straight over his head. He cut the comms line as he evaded to the right, then grabbed the karate dojo dummy in his reach and used it sling himself into the crowd feet first. There were eight of them. No problem. He extended the staff and took out the first two with a quick jab forward and backward, then evaded the punch for his head and brought the metal down hard against his opponent’s neck. Two more came for him from the front. He retracted the staff, vaulted in between them, and extended it just as his hand passed the line of their necks. One twist later, the bo staff was full length again and two skulls cracked loudly.

That left him with only three and apparently they had learned. They were keeping their distance and aiming their guns. Tim threw a shuriken at one of the rifles and smiled at the curses its owner rattled off as he tried to unstuck the jammed weapon, then moved in quickly to grab another soldier by the gun, sweep his feet out from under him, and bring the butt of the rifle down hard on his head.

When he turned around to face his last two conscious opponents, one of them was already down on the floor, barely breathing. The other one was twitching uncontrollably as fifty-thousand volts ran through his body. When he finally fell, Nightwing shouldered his escrima sticks once more and took a look around.

“Aww... I missed half the party...”

“Dick!” Tim smiled. An honest to god, happy smile. So many things had gone wrong this night, he had half-expected to hear that Dick had gotten caught up in some unmanageable death trap, but here he was, not a single scratch to his costume or his face. Apparently, there really was a god. “Man, am I glad to see you.”

“Same, Robin,” Dick flashed him a quick grin then started zip-tying the downed soldiers. “Alfred told me I’d find you here, said you’d taken over for B. I’ve been working with him all night and I’ve got the location of another truck. Figured you might want to check it out.”

“Truck?” Tim was honestly puzzled. Alright, he hadn’t paid as much attention to Bruce’s on-going tasks as he should have tonight, but then again, Bruce had told him to stay focused on the cure.

“Yeah, Penguin’s refrigerator trucks? The ones that lead us to his weapon caches?”

“Right. _Those_ trucks.”

Dick laughed. “Robin... I think we need to talk.”

***

They decided to do their talking in the Clock Tower, which was fine with Tim, as far as he was concerned. It meant they could have Alfred on a video call while Dick was discussing whatever he wanted to discuss and they would not have to worry about common street thugs interrupting them.

More importantly, he could have a freaking drink while he was digesting everything that had happened so far. Tim offered Dick a glass that was politely declined, then opened a bottle of one of Barbara’s reds and poured a glass for himself. If ever a night had called for alcohol, it was this one.

The shift in Dick’s demeanor was subtle, but Tim caught it nonetheless. The moment Alfred’s comms came online and the holopointer projected his picture, the moment the briefing had started, so to speak, every last trace of fun and light-hearted banter vanished from Dick’s face and voice. There was no more Dick Grayson. Only Nightwing. Tim had not seen that side of him often, but whenever he did, his incredulous questioning of why Dick had ever left the manor and Batman behind dissolved into thin air. Bruce was not one to share command. Dick loved taking charge and he was good at it.

Tim was surprised no part of the manor had blown up during that supposedly epic last fight they had had.

“Alright,” Dick clasped his hands together. “We don’t have much time and I don’t think we’re all up to the same intel standard, so here we go.” He turned to Tim first. “You said Bruce is currently out of commission and holed up at Panessa Studios. How serious are his injuries? Why isn’t he answering comms? I can reach neither his cowl nor his gauntlets.”

Tim grimaced. He had hoped not to get into this discussion before the night was over, but...

“You remember how Joker poisoned Bruce with his blood in Arkham City?”

“Yeah.” Dick nodded. “He took the cure Freeze gave him and then Joker died. Good riddance.”

“He took half the cure,” Tim corrected. “And it didn’t work. He’s been suffering the same infection King, Charisma, and Bell have, only much slower. Oh, and Henry wasn’t immune either, so all that time I spent working on a cure—completely wasted. I could have been helping with finding Barbara and taking down Scarecrow but—“

“Tim.” Dick’s voice cut like a knife, but there was no malice behind it. “Stop. Just stop right now. It’s in the past. You can’t change it. We can talk about that tomorrow. What exactly did you do with Bruce?”

Tim blinked. He had expected at least a bit of shock, at least a bit of arguing. Instead, Dick didn’t even seem to question a single word he said. As a matter of fact, Alfred was the one who looked shocked and lost for words. “You’re taking this pretty well...”

“I’m not,” Dick said as a matter of fact. “Trust me: internally, I’m currently mimicking Siryn from the X-Men, but if we start second-guessing each other now, this city will be doused in fear gas before we’re done talking. What did you do with Bruce?”

“I put him in the fifth isolation chamber.” It sounded... wrong. Robin was not supposed to work against Batman and yet here he was. “I took his cowl, belt, and gauntlets and locked it all up safely, although I took some of his gadgets that might be useful. The voice synthesizer. The disruptor. The RHD. I left his bio-tracker online. It should still be broadcasting.”

“Indeed it is,” Alfred said quickly. “I’ve been monitoring Master Bruce’s vitals since Master Drake took over for him, and while his heart rate is slightly elevated, all parameters are within acceptable range, in Panessa Studios.”

“I also blocked all his logins on the Batcomputer,” Tim added. "Even if he does get out of cell, he’ll be stuck in that room.”

“Not for long,” Dick mused. “Alfred, keep an eye on that tracker. Let me know as soon as anything changes. Now, what’s the situation in Gotham and how much of it will we need the car for?”

Tim cursed under his breath as Alfred’s hologram minimized into a thumbnail at the bottom of the display and the city map appeared. It looked like a suburb lawn after a piñata party.

To his right, Dick stood unflinching, a scowl set on his face. “Alfred, eliminate all of the information from Riddler’s informants. We’ve got a hundred better things to do tonight than hunting down all his silly trophies.”

“Agreed, Master Grayson.” The map flickered for a second and half the icons vanished. Tim sighed once more. That was better. But still pretty horrible. “Unfortunately, the Batcomputer can’t pinpoint the exact locations of militia activity, but we can tell that there are currently six roadblocks in the city, four on Miagani Island, two on Founders’ Island. So far, Master Bruce has not required the car for any of these. There are also four towers, two on Miagani, one on each Bleake and Founders’, as well as three bombs, one on each island. There are also fifteen street-bound drones remaining on Bleake Island and four airborne drones per island.”

Tim scoffed. “Yeah, the Arkham Knight did say something about sending in reinforcements to find Batman. I’m honestly surprised he’s sending so little.”

“Maybe he’s finally running out of drones,” Dick suggested, ever the optimist.

“Or maybe he just doesn’t think he’ll need more, because he’s got the Cloudburst now.” Tim hated playing the pessimist. It wasn’t a role he was very good at. Realist though... that he could do.

“Speaking of the Cloudburst,” Alfred continued, “the Batwing has not yet been able to find its energy signature. However, there are another five situations that might require your attention.” The map disappeared. Instead, the Batcomputer opened what Tim recognized as Bruce’s casefile log. “Selina Kyle is still trapped at the orphanage. Last I heard, Master Bruce wanted to retrieve the remote electrical charge from GCPD to solve the last riddle trap Mr. Nigma had prepared for him. Secondly, Mister Fox has been out of contact for a while. Third, we have received a distress signal from a stranded cargo vessel off the shores of Miagani Island. Fourth, the Batcomputer is detecting seismic activity on Miagani Island proper. Last but not least, the man-bat creature is still at large somewhere in the city.”

“Well, if all he does is fly around, screeching like crazy, he can stay up there all night, for all I care,” Dick said with a quick eyeroll. “Sixth, I found another one of Penguin’s caches.”

“Seventh, Barbara is still out there somewhere,” Tim cut in quickly. “We need to find her! I mean, yeah, militia and guns and distress signals are all important, but... it’s Barb! We should be looking for her first!”

“And where do you suppose we start with that, huh?” Dick sighed, then took off his mask and let his shoulders sink just a little. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted from cold and commanding to warm and understanding once more. “Listen, Tim, I know how much she means to you. Trust me: I really do. There was a time I loved her just as much as you love her now and I KNOW how much this must hurt. We all want her back, but we are searching for a needle in a haystack and even if we find her, it will be a lot tougher to get her out of Scarecrow's clutches with the Knight’s army still half intact.”

“Yeah, and if we wait too long, she might be dead before we find her!”

“If Scarecrow wanted her dead, he wouldn’t have needed a decoy in that penthouse.”

“But—“ Whatever Tim had been wanted to say was cut short by a sudden hug. Tim flinched. Somehow he never saw this coming. One, because Dick was just that insanely fast. Two, because... well... Bruce was not exactly the hugging sort. Neither had been Jack.

“We’ll find her, Tim.” Dick took a step back and placed his hands firmly on Tim’s shoulders. “We’ll find her, ok? I promise.”

“Okay.” It came out a lot quieter than Tim had wanted. A Dick Grayson promise was worth his weight in gold. He wanted to believe. But then again, Dick had promised to find a lost bird once before.

The memory of that year still haunted all of them. Tim doubted it would ever stop.

“Alright then.” The cowl came back on and so did the commanding voice. Dick rolled his shoulders and took a deep breath. “I’ll go grab the REC from GCPD’s evidence locker. Then I’ll head to Wayne Tower to check on Lucius.”

“Take this with you.” He pushed the disruptor and the voice synthesizer into Dick’s hands before he could say no. “Don’t know how thorough Lucius was with that lockdown, but this should help getting around internal security and you'll need the tracker in the disrupter if you're gonna go after that freezer truck.”

“Right,” Dick nodded. "I actually get to take one of those down on my own this time!" He sounded almost giddy, but thankfully the moment passed before Tim could roll his eyes. This was really not the time and the place. “In the meantime—“

“Batmobile. Bombs _in_ the road. Tanks _on_ the road. I’ve got it covered.”

Tim wasn’t so sure about that. After all, the Batmobile was still pretty new technology to him and the last time he had gone up against a single one of those tanks, it had only ended well because Bruce had re-inforced that hull four times over the last month. Then again, Tim had been blind with grief and despair at the time. This time, he had to do better. This time he had to pull himself together. Dick was right. They could get through this. If they worked together. And they would find Barbara, too.

“Thanks, Tim.”

Dick turned back to the computer and initiated the shutdown sequence. The apartment rearranged itself to replace computers with furniture and remove the blast shields from the clock faces neatly as ever and only half a minute later it looked just like a normal apartment again. Tim tried to take some comfort in that. And to ignore the empty wheel chair standing next to the couch.

Dick grappled out first and headed straight for GCPD. Tim watched him slip into the shadows quick and silent as a cat, before turning on the detective vision mode of his cowl once more. The drones stood out in bright orange against the soft blue rendering of the city buildings.

Robin sighed and headed to the Batmobile. This was going to be one long night.


End file.
